Re: 2TB USB hard drive for backing up
On Sat, Apr 21, 2012 at 05:36:28PM +0100, Sian Mountbatten wrote:
> I am going to buy a big USB hard drive to backup films, music and
> photos. In fact, I might backup the system (at least, the list of
> packages installed).
>
> Anybody out there tried a 2TB USB hard drive? What did you use as
> filing system. I am intending to use ext4. Any comments?
You are conflating backup and filing here. If you are using it for
backup, set up a large partition (larger than the source partition)
and use something like rdiff-backup, bup or duplicity to back up
your source machine(s) onto the disk. Don't file onto the disk, file
on your computer and use the disk for backup.
Or, if you are to use the disc for filing, be aware that it can fail
just as an internal disc can.
If you really want to use the drive for both backup and filing
(perhaps you have more multimedia than you can fit on your computer's
internal storage), I'd recommend using seperate LVM logical volumes,
one purely for backup and the other for files, and still be aware
that you haven't solved the backup issue for the filing partition.
(maybe you can burn those to disc and divide up your file storage into
directories corresponding to the discs the backups reside on; a tool
such as 'datapacker' could help you with this)
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